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by bayarearefugee 69 days ago
> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,”

The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA.

I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the form of a cartoon fox what to do and he spit out a bunch of vibecode software written by AI-driven virtual cartoon characters" is not among the answers they want to hear.

5 comments

Keep in mind investing in cartoon foxes was a "business strategy" a lot of (otherwise serious) people bought into in 2020-2021.

And those cartoon foxes didn't even do anything! I guess these ones do?

Don't put it past the masses. These are crazy times.

The influence of cartoon foxes on business strategies in tech has a long history and cannot be overstated.

https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-3.html

Ehhh in my experience compliance auditors are 10 behind the cutting edge. I still see auditors that don't understand Kubernetes and so ask the same questions they would about on prem machines. They don't know the questions to ask to get to the real meat of the risks. This leads them to allow things through that probably deserve more scrutiny. I bet the same thing will happen with LLM tools like this. They'll just ask if you use PRs and wave you on through.
I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:

> the thing must be in the place where it should be

With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?

> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.

Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.

So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.

I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).

So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.

Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.
Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?
Same institution I’d send Steve today.

The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind.

Dominique, nique, nique…

we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?
Beads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January.

Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.

"every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of institutionalization.
Among the general population, no. Among a population of coders, it should be the stuff of institutionalization.
> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.

Could work